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One of my favorite museums in the world, Evergreen Museum & Library, is located in the city where you would least expect to find such an opulent jewel. It sits on 26 landscaped acres in a leafy neighborhood in the northern quartile of Baltimore. Walk through this Gilded Age homestead of the Garrett family -- railroad barons who built the Baltimore & Ohio -- and you get a strong sense of an eccentric family from the bric-a-brac that fills this 48-room Italianate villa.

Upstairs, near the family bedchambers, the Garretts reclined their derrieres on America's only gold toilet seat. A proper throne, in short, worthy of the family, where even the bathroom's wooden shutters are gilded with 23-karat gold leaf. In the downstairs walnut library, opening out onto the gardens, the family gathered to read rare books. Among the museum's 30,000 volumes are 140 works constituting one of the largest private collections of incunabula -- books printed before 1501. The museum also has the first bible printed in America and one of the world's few surviving double-elephant Audubon folios (50 inches tall) of Birds Of America. The private theater on the second floor was designed by family friend Leon Bakst, the artist best known as the set and costume designer for the Ballet Russe. It is in this charming theater that Alice Garrett endlessly performed her amateur song-and-dance numbers before her captive houseguests.

Why, might you ask, is Barron's Penta going on about a little-known museum? Because if you're like many wealthy folks, you're looking to plan some more family travel, and Baltimore can make for an easy and rewarding getaway between more exotic trips overseas. The city, to my mind, is America's Marseille.

Baltimore's colonial merchant houses, the warehouses near the old port -- not far from the boarded-up shop fronts and buckled pavement made famous by the HBO series The Wire -- are all redolent of a slightly seedy grandeur similar to Marseille's. Baltimore, I confess, was never high on my must-see list of cities prior to my daughter's attendance at that pricey institution of higher learning known as Johns Hopkins University, but I have since become a devotee of this deeply atmospheric port city. It's an American original. It's authentic.

But you do need a good compass. The revived piers in Baltimore's Inner Harbor are predictably filled with chains, from Hard Rock Café to P.F. Chang's, but veer just slightly from the harbor's fanny-pack pit-stops into the quieter adjacent neighborhoods, and unexpected pleasures await, often at a fraction of New York's or D.C.'s costs.

My favorite restaurant in the lively cobblestone streets of old Fell's Point is the Black Olive, a stylish Greek restaurant specializing in fish. Upon your arrival, the waiter guides you to a chilled glass counter for you to pick your dinner from the day's catch -- grilled dorade or sautéed barbouni (a small-boned fish that the ancient Greeks deemed the only fish acceptable for offering to the gods). A few blocks away, on the edge of Fell's Point, stands Pazo, a fiery Spanish restaurant that has been carved out of a converted warehouse. A soaring ceiling, an oversized dining pit, and lush murals are the backdrop to wood-grilled mushrooms and arroz negro (black rice stuffed with shrimp and cuttlefish).

The Admiral Fell Inn, where Edgar Allan Poe is said to have had his last stiff drink, is smack in the middle of atmospheric Fell's Point, but my family usually stays at the old-world hotel in Mount Vernon, the Peabody Court.

THE MOUNT VERNON SECTION OF BALTIMORE, with its central 1815 statue of George Washington, is like a stately London Square surrounded by elegant townhouses, clubs, and brownstones. The Peabody Institute, the nation's second-oldest conservatory and now run by Johns Hopkins, and the Walters Art Museum are central to the neighborhood. The Walters' Chamber of Wonders, a hall filled with curios that a 17th-century Flemish nobleman might collect, such as a narwhal tusk, faux mermaid, and "corn mummy," is a must-see, even with young children. Mount Vernon also has a very fine Afghan restaurant, The Helmand, owned by one of President Karzai's brothers.

For those with an adventurous spirit, I urge you to make your way to the funky neighborhood of Hampden, best known as the "Baltimore kitsch" playground of the controversial film director John Waters. It's filled with Sicilian-looking palm readers, antique stores, and some surprisingly good restaurants. Grano Emporio, in the bottom two floors of what looks like a modest home in New York's Queens, is in fact charming and stylish and serves squeaky fresh fare: The Zuppa di Pesce Alla Luciana, a robust seafood stew, followed by a flourless almond cake, could have held their heads high in San Francisco, London, or New York, but cost about a third of what those dishes would go for in those cities.